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When I first saw this video, I couldn’t believe it. All the years we have spent in public education on teacher professional development over learning styles only to “discover” that such learning styles really don’t matter at all.

BTW, tagged you for an award… you can go to my site for info if you wish.

Surely Mr. Willingham’s name is mud in academic circles? I was delighted to see his clear explanation, since I have always wondered if “learning styles” really worked in the classroom, not being able, as a high school English teacher, to visualize (!) how.

But his credentials for talking about psychology check out perfectly well. The stuff we get told about how children learn has never been mainstream academic psychology. Have you ever noticed that most “psychology for teachers” books are written by people who have never lectured at anywhere more prestigious than an FE college?

Great video. I was taught that there was no real evidence to support learning styles but that it was just a good way of checking that your lesson had variety. I have looked on Willingham’s site. Some really really interesting stuff on deep learning and rewards. Thanks for pointing me in his direction.

In addition, the complexity of the learning styles
field and the lack of an overarching synthesis of the main models, or of dialogue between the leading
proponents of individual models, lead to the impression of a research area that has become fragmented, isolated and ineffective. In the last 20 years, there has been only a single use of the term ‘learning styles’ and three uses of the term ‘cognitive styles’ in the Annual Review of Psychology. We have also noted that these terms are not included in the indexes in four widely used textbooks on cognitive and educational psychology. Instead, psychometric specialists speak mainly to each other about the merits or otherwise of particular instruments. (p. 55)

Finally, we want to ask: why should politicians,
policy-makers, senior managers and practitioners
in post-16 learning concern themselves with learning
styles, when the really big issues concern the large
percentages of students within the sector who either
drop out or end up without any qualifications?
(p. 63)